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News Notes S p r i n g 2 0 0 9 􀀁􀄠 I s s u e F o r t y - t h r e e C omp S c i @ C a r o l i n a
In this issue
1 The Rise of Robotics
2 Meet Ron Alterovitz
3 LITMUSRT
4 Alumni Profile - Aaron
Fulkerson, B.S. 2004
5 Alumni News
6 Recent Publications
7 Department News
Dear Friends,
The academic year is drawing to a close. Soon we will award degrees to another set of graduates and send
them on their way into a challenging economy. We have also recently extended our graduate admissions
deadline for fall 2009 to May 31. It is our hope that this will give Triangle locals in the technology industry
the option of getting an advanced degree should they find themselves out of work.
The number of undergraduate students we are teaching is growing rapidly, up 30 per cent over the last
three years. This comes at a time when we’re losing faculty to retirement, making it challenging to meet
our undergraduate teaching demands. We said farewell to Jeannie Walsh, Senior Lecturer and Director of
General Studies, at the end of the fall 2008 semester.
This spring we welcomed Assistant Professor Ron Alterovitz to the department. Ron is part of our expanding robotics group
and joins us from UC Berkely and the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center where he was an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
You can read more about Ron on page 2, and more about our robotics research below.
We were very proud to learn that our own Michael Reiter had been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
last fall. Mike was recognized for his innovations in the field of computer security.
In this issue of News & Notes, we’re introducing a new feature - an extended alumni profile. Be sure to check out the story about
B.S. alum Aaron Fulkerson on page 4. Interested in being the subject of the alumni profile in a future News & Notes? Send an
email to pubs@cs.unc.edu.
On a final note, this is the last edition of News & Notes for me as department chairman. I am happy to announce that Anselmo
Lastra will be named chairman effective July 1, 2009. Many great things have happened in the past five years and it has been a
pleasure to serve the department as chair. I know that Anselmo will do a fine job leading the department.
Have a great summer!
Robot algorithms have been studied in the
Computer Science Department for a de-cade,
but they’ve developed a higher pro-file
recently. “We’ve been paying more at-tention
to robotics in the last three to four
years,” says Dr. Dinesh Manocha. The triad
of Dr. Ming Lin, Dr. Ron Alterovitz and
Manocha form the core of the Robotics re-search
group.
“Robot Algorithms refer to a broad set of
computational methods that has been de-signed
for physical objects in the real world.
They primarily deal with issues related to
spatial arrangement of objects, task plan-ning,
and geometric reasoning, and they’re
characterized by their physical complexi-ty,”
he explains. “We’ve worked on collision
checking, motion planning, robotic simula-tion,
and multi-robot coordination. We’re
also working in multi-agent and crowd
simulations and now traffic simulation,
which are emerging applications of robot
algorithms. Along with a postdoc, Jur van
den Berg, many graduate students, and the
addition of Ron, we have reached a critical
mass to start a new robotics lab for both
research and educational purposes.” Many
graduate students, including Liangjun
Zhang and Russell Gayle, have developed
new robot motion-planning algorithms as
part of their PhD dissertations.
Alterovitz, whose work is focused on link-ing
medical image analysis to medical ro-bots,
is setting up a work station in the
western half of the Sitterson graphics lab,
as the new robotics lab will be shared by
multiple faculty members. The remaining
area is being freshly deployed as a large
area for multiple-robot coordination, which
will include several cameras mounted for
tracking their movements. Graduate stu-
The Rise of Robotics
continued on page 2
News Notes News Notes 3
Dr. Ron Altero-vitz,
who joined
the faculty in
January, brings
a new strength
to the depart-ment,
linking
medical imaging
more closely to
robotic hardware
through physi-cally
based simu-lations
and motion planning.
“Medical imaging is more precise than
it’s ever been,” he explains. “We often
can see quite clearly where the goal is,
plus the obstacles, such as small vessels
and nerves. In parallel, there have been
a lot of developments in robotic hard-ware.
My work is in the middle, the
algorithms for motion planning. I take
information from medical images and
turn it into actions for robots to per-form.”
Alterovitz earned his PhD at Berkeley
in 2006 in Industrial Engineering and
Operations Research. He spent a year
in Toulouse, France, with the Robotics
and AI group at LAAS-CNRS (Nation-al
Center for Scientific Research) before
returning to Berkeley as an NIH Post-doctoral
Research Fellow, conducting
research in conjunction with the UCSF
Comprehensive Cancer Center.
One of the primary medical applica-tions
he has focused on is brachythera-py,
a treatment for prostate cancer that
involves inserting radioactive “seeds”
near the cancer in the prostate. The
challenge has been how to implant the
seeds accurately in deformable tissue.
“Brachytherapy has a fairly high suc-cess
rate, but there are side effects if the
seeds are misplaced,” he says. He writes
programs for physically based simula-tions,
and then develops planners to
improve the quality of the procedure.
In addition, Alterovitz has been ad-dressing
the problem from the hard-ware
side. His work at Berkeley in-cluded
research leading to a group
patent application for a “steerable
needle,” a highly flexible needle made
of Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and tita-nium.
Its beveled tip causes it to curve
when penetrating soft tissue, enabling
the placement of seeds in previously
unreachable locations. The steerable
Ron Alterovitz: A Link Between Medical Imaging and Robotics
2
dents Stephen Guy and Jamie Snape
have been studying the use of disc-shaped
Roombas robotics toolkits for
teaching courses in robotics and per-forming
research in multi-robot coor-dination
and planning.
“More research projects are possible
because of this new robotics lab,” says
Manocha. “And it will be used both
for research and teaching, as well as
showing various demonstrations.”
The current offerings in robotics in-clude
two graduate courses, An In-troduction
to Robotics and Robot
Motion Planning, which are taught at
different times by Lin and Manocha.
Alterovitz is currently teaching a new
graduate class, Medical Robotics and
Simulation. They intend to add an un-dergraduate
class for junior and senior
computer science majors.
Manocha’s primary research is in
broad-area robotic algorithms for sim-ulation
projects funded by National
Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Army
Research Office, and RDECOM. Lin
currently also has an NSF grant joint-ly
with the University of Maryland,
University of Wisconsin, and Drex-el
University. This project proposes
to use current Cyber-Infrastructure
with a focused domain
on bio-inspired robotics
to implement a multi-disciplinary
educational
program in Engineering
Informatics, which refers
to the science of repre-sentation,
simulation, ar-chiving,
and reuse of en-gineering
knowledge in
transformative ways. The
design and realization
of bio-inspired robots
require knowledge from
multiple domains (e.g.,
software, algorithms, me-chanical
structure, elec-tronics);
different types
of individual engineering
models and simulations
need to be integrated to-gether
to support the de-sign
process.
“Based on our early re-sults,
the excitement
associated with bio-in-spired
robots has attract-ed
students of different
backgrounds to use in-formation
technology for better engi-neering
design,” says Lin. “In addition
to its tremendous potential for a wide
range of services to the society, we
believe robotics can also provide some
engaging hands-on experiences and a
fascinating physical context to attract
more bright students into studying
computer science and advancing the
field of computing.”
The Rise of Robotics, continued from page 1
continued on page 3
The image above shows the use of motion planning for medical
applications: path computation for liver chemoembolization.
continued on page 3
3
LITMUSRT is one of the latest projects
being worked on by the Real-Time Sys-tems
group, led by Professors Jim An-derson
and Sanjoy Baruah.
LITMUSRT is an extension of the Li-nux
kernel produced at UNC. Currently
maintained by graduate student Bjoern
Brandenburg, LITMUSRT’s purpose is
to serve as a testbed for prototyping ad-vanced
multiprocessor real-time sched-uling
and synchronization algorithms.
It allows researchers to investigate real-world
limitations and the impact of over-heads
on system performance, which is
difficult to do with just theory.
For example, in a case study on the
scalability of real-time scheduling al-gorithms
on large multicore platforms
such as SUN’s UltraSPARC, it was
found that “staggering” timer inter-rupts
across cores can greatly help to
reduce bus contention. In experiments
using LITMUSRT on an 2x4 core In-tel
Nehalem system, it was shown that
cache-aware real-time schedulers can
significantly reduce cache-thrashing in
a video player.
Work on LITMUSRT started in 2006,
and a number of graduate students
have contributed to the project over the
years. So far, nine papers have been pub-lished
that report on LITMUSRT-related
research. Anderson is also supervising
an undergraduate honors thesis that is
related to the project.
LITMUSRT is publicly available at
www.cs.unc.edu/~anderson/litmus-rt/.
The published code has been used by
researchers in Asia, Europe and North
America.
Research funding for LITMUSRT comes
from IBM, SUN, Intel Corporation, the
National Science Foundation and the
Army Research Office.
LITMUSRT - LInux Testbed for MUltiprocessor Scheduling in Real-Time systems
Ron Alterovitz, continued from page 2
Logo designed by Jasper McChesney
In addition to innovative curriculum de-velopment
using the state-of-art research
in robotics, Lin and Manocha have also
received support from Intel and Micro-soft
for some of the applications areas
such as crowd simulation. For example,
as part of a joint collaboration, UNC and
Intel researchers have developed a new
approach that can exploit the capabili-ties
of many-core processors to develop
a highly parallel multi-agent simulation
algorithm.
Alterovitz, in his first semester at Caro-lina,
is working on making connections
in the UNC Hospital network to estab-lish
collaborations with which he can
build on his previous research (see his
profile on page 2).
Robotics is a serious field with a mul-titude
of critical functions in medicine
and industry. But because of its long
history in science fiction, it also engen-ders
a sense of fun. This mood can be
found in Robotics Club, which is led by
Lin and usually attracts a dozen or so
undergraduate students in a semester.
In their informal gatherings, they have
built wall-climbing robots and pro-grammed
them to navigate around ob-stacles.
New faces, new ideas, and the sound of
a herd of Roombas will soon attract
even more students into this fascinating
discipline within computer science. The
new robotics lab has room for them.
The Rise of Robotics, continued from page 2
Real-Time Systems Update
A primary area of research for the
department’s Real-Time Systems
group is the development of operat-ing-
systems infrastructure for sup-porting
real-time applications on
multicore platforms. Such applica-tions
might be found, for example,
in gaming systems, multimedia
systems and control systems in air-craft.
The group is currently working with
global security company Northrop
Grumman Corporation to determine
the viability of using multicore plat-forms
in real-time control systems in
unmanned aerial vehicles. The major
challenge in this effort lies in devising
techniques for “isolating” different
system components so that the real-time
correctness of different compo-nents
can be validated independently.
Validating real-time correctness is a
key part of the overall process of cer-tifying
an aircraft design. Certifica-tion
becomes much simpler if smaller
sub-systems can be analyzed inde-pendently.
needle was developed with mechanical
engineers at Johns Hopkins University.
Alterovitz expects to build on that re-search
at UNC with new collaborations.
He’s making connections with Drs. Ed-ward
Chaney and Julian Rosenmann in
Radiation Oncology to explore new ap-plications
for the steerable needle and
other minimally invasive devices. “We’re
looking at prostate cancer and other
types of cancer,” he says. “Breast and
pancreatic cancer might be next.” He’s
also met with engineers at N.C. State to
discuss ideas on the robotic hardware
side. “The next step would be extensions
of the steerable needle. A key challenge is
to develop a device for which all electri-cal
components are outside the body, but
that is capable of following curved paths
inside the body.”
Inside the Department are more paths
of collaboration. Alterovtiz sees a natu-ral
hardware collaborator in the Applied
Engineering Lab, and looks forward to
new research in physically based simu-lations
and motion planning with Drs.
Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha.
This semester, he’s teaching COMP 790-
099, Medical Robotics and Simulation,
and learning about Chapel Hill. He and
his wife, Sheyna, arrived from Berkeley
in December. She is finishing her the-sis
for a master’s degree in gerontology
from San Francisco State University and
intends to pursue advocacy on behalf of
older adults.
“Both Sheyna and I have liked it here a lot
so far. Everyone is friendly—we’re used
to the brusque atmosphere of California.
Chapel Hill has a nice balance that I’m
appreciating.”
News Notes News Notes 5
Aaron Fulkerson (BS 2004) says he
was delusional when he thought he
could get a computer science degree
at UNC. He had a high school GPA
of 1.67 and had been backpacking for
nearly four years. He wasn’t an admis-sions
office dream, but the ideal can-didate
rarely succeeds the way Fulker-son
has. His company, MindTouch, has
28 employees and clients that include
Intel, UCLA Law School and the U.S.
Department of Defense, and it’s been
featured in the New York Times, Wall
Street Journal and “every tech publica-tion
that matters.”
Fulkerson’s travels had brought him to
Minnesota and a series of short-term
technology jobs. He decided he wanted
a computer science degree and he con-cluded
he wanted to study in the pro-gram
Fred Brooks had created. That’s
when a level of effort and creativity not
indicated by a 1.67 GPA kicked in.
“I told my wife to look for a job in
North Carolina and we’d move there
and I’d go to UNC,” says Fulkerson.
“She went to a teaching job fair in Dur-ham
the next weekend and was hired
on the spot. We moved and I started at
Durham Tech.” The new student buck-led
down and simultaneously launched
community-service non-profits in
public housing areas of Durham, us-ing
refurbished computers to teach
with technology. His service work and
his A.S. degree attracted a recruiter
from N.C. State, but Fulkerson heard
only the siren song of UNC’s CS Dept.
He liked its focus on mathematics and
theory. “Lots of people can program,”
Fulkerson says, “but not everyone
knows why they can do it.” His per-sistence
garnered him a champion in
the admissions office and a $30,000/
year Jack Kent Cook scholarship, and
he became a Carolina student in 2002
without ever taking an SAT.
Fulkerson concentrated on web devel-opment
and software engineering “be-cause
I wanted to focus on what I could
make a business out of.” His academic
mentor was Kevin Jeffay, Gillian Cell
Distinguished Professor and Director
Alumni Profile - MindTouch Deki: A Blockbuster Built on Open Source Software
of Undergraduate Stud-ies.
“I adopted Kevin as
my advisor,” he says. “He
had a big impact on my
success in school.” The
success of his business he
credits in great part to
Professor Diane Pozefsky
(PhD 1979). “During my
last year, she was helping
me plan it and avoid po-tential
pitfalls. She’d say,
‘What’s the problem we’re
solving?’ ‘How are we dif-ferentiating
this product?’
I often bounced ideas off
her and she gave me a lot historical
perspective, input on how to position
a company and market it. She has a lot
to do with the success of it.”
So what’s the problem MindTouch
(www.mindtouch.com) is solving? “Any
modern organization has a difficult
time getting access to information,
sharing and collaborating. We all are
too familiar with the many different
media types and formats and discon-nected
systems that creates a snarl
of data silos we’re forced to tediously
navigate daily at work,” explains Fulk-erson.
“So, at MindTouch we developed
an easy-to-use, web-based application
that is a lot like a simple word proces-sor,
but rather than just text, you can
add images, video, audio, feeds, data-base
queries, web services, etc. Ev-erything
is versioned, the content is
updated real-time from other systems
and databases and, most importantly,
anyone can edit. MindTouch is the
glue that bridges common application
and data silos and if you’re familiar
with wikis, you’ll recognize this as
something very wiki-like in its ease of
use.”
Fulkerson met his partner, Steve Bjorg,
during a 2003 internship at Micro-soft,
where they worked in the office
of the CTO on distributed systems re-search.
After he graduated from UNC
in 2004, Fulkerson and his wife moved
back to Minnesota, and he worked
steadily with Bjorg and two program-mers,
each of whom was in a different
state. “We were a distributed system.
We talked at midnight every Monday.”
They went live in January 2005.
Fulkerson defines his company as “an
open-source enterprise collaboration
and community platform that enables
users to connect and remix enterprise
applications, data sources and web
services.” They give away the open-source
software, making money when
users of the free version come back for
the more stable, licensed version that
is further tested and offers more fea-tures.
An example is whorunsgov.com, a
product of the Washington Post. “It’s a
moderated wiki that journalists at the
paper use and you can contribute to—
and all content is being pulled in from
outside sources.”
Now based in San Diego, MindTouch
is on a strong upward trajectory. “The
product is not yet three years old,”
Fulkerson says, “and we have hun-dreds
of thousands of installations and
many millions of users.” The client list
includes high tech, government and
university customers such as Mozilla,
Microsoft, NIH and the Harvard Law
School.
Has Fulkerson any advice for oth-ers
starting businesses? “It’s what I
learned from Diane Pozefsky: The
team is critically important. You’ve
got to have resonance with your team
from day zero. Also, seek out smart
people and learn as much as you can
from them.”
4
3
M.S. AND PH.D. ALUMNI
J. Michael Fitzpatrick (MS 1982),
professor of computer science, com-puter
engineering and electrical en-gineering
at the Vanderbilt School of
Engineering, was named a Fellow of
SPIE, the International Society for
Optical Engineering, in 2008. In ad-dition
to his position in the School of
Engineering, Mike is co-director of
the Electrical Engineering and Com-puter
Science Medical Image Process-ing
Laboratory at Vanderbilt. His cur-rent
work focuses on medical imaging
and image processing, image regis-tration,
magnetic resonance imaging,
and image guidance for ear surgery
and neurosurgery. (jmf@eecsmail.vuse.
vanderbilt.edu)
Yen-Ping Shan’s (PhD 1990) com-pany,
iSource Technologies, provided
substantial consulting services to the
Beijing Olympics. Experts in a wide
variety of fields (e.g. Water treatment,
traffic management) were brought
in from all over the world to help.
(ypshan@bizwoh.rr.com)
Ritu Chadha (PhD 1991) was elected
a Telcordia fellow in 2008 and is cur-rently
leading a large contract award-ed
to Telcordia by the US Army relat-ed
to ad hoc network management. A
podcast about this work can be heard
at: telephonyonline.com/podcasts/ad-hoc-mobile-
network-1114/. Ritu has also
recently published several papers, in-cluding:
Chiang, C.-Y. J., R. Chadha, S. Newman, R.
Orlando, K. Jakubowski, and R. Lo. “Build-ing
a versatile testbed for supporting testing
and tactical network management tools and
their interoperability,” Proc. of IEEE MIL-COM
2008, San Diego, CA, November 17-19,
2008.
Kant, L., and R. Chadha. “MANET Manage-ment:
Industry Challenges & Potential Solu-tions,”
Proc of the 9th International Symposium
on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia
Networks, Newport Beach CA, June 2008.
(chadha@research.telcordia.com)
After living in the RTP area for more
than 12 years, Kah-Chan (KC) Low
(MS 1991) moved to Marshalls Creek,
Penn., right across from New Jersey,
in December 2007 so that his two
boys (thelowbrothers.com) can further
their music education at the Pre-Col-lege
Division of The Juilliard School.
He says he badly misses the nice and
mild non-winters of North Carolina!
(kahchanlow@yahoo.com)
Ronald Azuma (PhD 1995) is now a
Research Leader at a new laboratory:
the Nokia Research Center Holly-wood,
in Santa Monica, Calif. He will
be building and leading a team to de-velop
novel compelling Mixed Real-ity
experiences on mobile platforms.
(azuma@acm.org)
Rich Holloway (PhD 1995) has joined
numerous other UNC CS folks at
Morphormics, Inc. (www.morphormics.
com) He is taking over the job of VP
of Product Development from Lee
Nackman (PhD 1982), who has been
serving as the interim VP-PD since
mid-2008 (as mentioned in the fall
2008 News & Notes). Rich and his wife
Barbara still live in Chapel Hill with
their 4 children (Alexa-15, Bergen-12,
Lizzie-10, and Cole-5), a dog, 2 cats,
and a green snake. (richard.l.holloway@
gmail.com)
Jeff Hultquist (MS 1986, PhD 1995)
is now writing games for the iPhone.
Demonstration videos are on his web
site, NotebookPress.com. (jhultquist@
mac.com)
Megan Dunigan (MS 2004) was
named to the inaugural Southern Con-ference
Hall of Fame for her success in
women’s tennis. She was also named to
the Furman University Athletics Hall
of Fame in 2007 as the most decorat-ed
women’s tennis player in Southern
Conference history, having received
four league Player of the Year awards.
Brad Davis (PhD 2008) received the
2009 Linda Dykstra Distinguished
Dissertation Award in Math, Physical
Sciences & Engineering, which rec-ognizes
the scholarly contributions of
UNC-Chapel Hill doctoral students
as revealed through their disserta-tion
projects and highlights the timely
completion of doctoral training. Brad’s
dissertation was on Medical Image
Analysis via Fréchet Means of Diffeo-morphisms.
(brad.davis@kitware.com)
Kyle Moore (MS 2008) is working for
SportsMEDIA Technology Corpora-tion
in Durham, NC. (kylejessemoore@
gmail.com)
Sashi Kumar Penta (MS 2008) is
working for the Visual Computing
Group at Intel Corporation on the Lar-rabee
project. (sashikumar@gmail.com)
UNDERGRADUATE ALUMNI
Mark Hutchinson (BSMSci 1981) was
“promoted” to a Zone Advisor at experts-exchange.
com, and wrote an article,
Getting a Better Answer, that appeared
in the October 1, 2008, Experts-Ex-change
newsletter: www.ee-stuff.com/
Newsl et t er/100108newsl et t e r.htm
(aikimark@aol.com)
Courtney McCarthy Ramey (BSMSci
2002) recently accepted a position as a
Director with Jabian Consulting in At-lanta,
Ga. (courtney.ramey@gmail.com)
Jaime Vega (BS 2005) works with
Lulu.com as a Software Engineer.
(jvega@lulu.com)
FORMER FACULTY
In April 2008, former faculty member
Akira Nakamura was decorated with
the Order of the Sacred Treasure from
the Emperor for his longtime teaching
work in the university and outstanding
research. (an1206@ad.cyberhome.ne.jp)
FAMILY MATTERS
Alan Forrest, Windows Systems Ad-ministrator,
married Julie Serdensky
on December 24, 2008, in Hillsbor-ough,
NC. ( forrest@cs.unc.edu)
David Gotz (PhD 2005) and his wife,
Anne, welcomed Sarah Paige Gotz on
December 28, 2009, in Mount Kisco,
NY. (dave@gotzfamily.org)
Christopher Sheldahl, graduate stu-dent,
and his wife, Angela, welcomed
Alexander John Sheldahl on January 2,
2009, in Chapel Hill, NC. (csheldahl@
earthlink.net)
Kyle Moore (MS 2008) married Kim-berly
Williams on January 31, 2009, in
Columbus, Ohio. (kylejessemore@gmail.
com)
Professor Steve Weiss and his wife,
Iris, welcomed a grandchild, Kyle
Aaron Weiss, on February 1, 2009, in
Fairfax, Va. Kyle’s parents are Heather
and Jeremy Weiss. (weiss@cs.unc.edu)
5
6 News Notes News Notes 7
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Ballard, L., S. Kamara, F. Monrose and M.K. Reiter.
“Towards practical biometric key generation with
randomized biometric templates,” Proc. of the 15th
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
Security, October 2008, 235–244.
Bauer, L., S. Garriss and M.K. Reiter. “Detecting
and resolving policy misconfigurations in access-control
systems,” Proc. of the 13th ACM Symposium
on Access Control Models and Technologies, June 2008,
185-194.
Brandenburg, B., and J. Anderson. “A Comparison
of the M-PCP, D-PCP, and FMLP on LITMUS-RT,”
Proc. of the 12th International Conference on
Principles of Distributed Systems, Luxor, Egypt,
Springer Verlag, December 2008, 105-124.
Brandenburg, B., J. Calandrino, and J. Anderson.
“On the Scalability of Real-Time Scheduling Al-gorithms
on Multicore Platforms: A Case Study,”
Proc. of the 29th IEEE Real-Time Systems Sympo-sium,
Barcelona, Spain, IEEE Computer Society
Press, December 2008, 157-169.
Desai, K.V., T.G. Bishop, L. Vicci, E.T. O’Brien,
R.M. Taylor, and R. Superfine. “Agnostic particle
tracking for three-dimensional motion of cellular
granules and membrane-tethered bead dynamics,”
Biophysical Journal, 2008, 94 (6): 2374-84.
Dinan, J., S. Olivier, G. Sabin, J. Prins, P. Sadayap-pan,
and C.-W. Tseng. “A Message Passing Bench-mark
for Unbalanced Applications,” Simulation
Modelling Practice and Theory, October 2008, 16 (9):
1177-1189.
Feasel, J., M.C. Whitton, and J.D. Wendt. “LLCM-WIP:
Low Latency, Continuous -Motion Walking-
In-Place,” Proc. of IEEE Symposium on 3D User In-terfaces,
2008, 97-104.
Feng, D., Y. Lee, L. Kwock, and R.M.Taylor. “Mul-tivariate
Scalar Volume Visualization for Relation-ship
and Value Estimation,” Transactions on Visual-ization
and Computer Graphics, 2008.
Galoppo, N., M.A. Otaduy, W. Moss, J. Sewall, S.
Curtis, M.C. Lin. “Controlling Deformable Mate-rial
with Dynamic Morph Targets,” ACM SIG-GRAPH
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and
Games, 2009.
Gao, D., M.K. Reiter and D. Song. “BinHunt: Au-tomatically
finding semantic differences in binary
programs,” Information and Communications Security,
10th International Conference, ICICS 2008 (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5308), October 2008,
238–255.
Gayle, R., W. Moss, M.C. Lin, and D. Manocha.
“Multi-Robot Coordination using Generalized So-cial
Potential Fields,” IEEE Conference on Robotics
and Automation, 2009.
Jerald, J., T.M. Peck, F. Steinicke, and M.C. Whit-ton.
“Sensitivity to Scene Motion for Phases of
Head Yaws,” Proc. of Applied Perception in Graphics
and Visualization, 2008.
Lauterbach, C., M.C. Lin, D. Manocha, S. Borkman,
E. LaFave, and M. Bauer. “Accelerating Line-of-
Sight Computations in Large OneSAF Terrains
with Dynamic Events,” I/ITSEC 2008, 2008.
Lauterbach, C., M. Garland, S. Sengupta, D. Lu-ebke,
and D. Manocha. “Fast BVH construction on
GPUs,” Eurographics 2009, 2009.
Leontyev, H., and J. Anderson. “A Unified Hard/
Soft Real-Time Schedulability Test for Global EDF
Multiprocessor Scheduling,” Proc. of the 29th IEEE
Real-Time Systems Symposium, Barcelona, Spain,
IEEE Computer Society Press, December 2008,
375-384.
Li, Z., X. Wang, Z. Liang, and M.K. Reiter. “AGIS:
Towards automatic generation of infection signa-tures,”
Proc. of the 38th IEEE/IFIP International
Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, June
2008, 237-246.
Lloyd, B., N. Govindaraju, C. Quammen, S. Molnar,
and D. Manocha. “Logarithmic Perspective Shadow
Maps,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2008, 27 (4).
McCune, J.M., A. Perrig and M.K. Reiter. “Safe pas-sage
for passwords and other sensitive data,” Proc. of
the 16th ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Secu-rity
Symposium, February 2009, 301–320.
McCune, J.M., A. Perrig and M.K. Reiter. “Seeing-is-
believing: Using camera-phones for human-verifiable
authentication,” International Journal on
Security and Networks, 2009, 4 (1-2): 43-56.
Merideth, M.G., and M.K. Reiter. “Write mark-ers
for probabilistic quorum systems,” Principles of
Distributed Systems, 12th International Conference,
OPODIS 2008 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Vol. 5401), December 2008, 5–21.
Mihalik, J.P., L. Kohli, and M.C. Whitton. “Do the
physical characteristics of a virtual reality device
contraindicate its use for balance assessment?”
Journal of Sport Rehabilitation, 2008, 17 (1): 38-49.
O’Brien, E.T., J. Cribb, D. Marshburn, R.M. Taylor,
and R. Superfine. “Chapter 16: Magnetic manipula-tion
for force measurements in cell biology,” Meth-ods
in Cell Biology, 2008, 89: 433-50.
O’Brien, E.T., M.R. Falvo, D. Millard, B. Eastwood,
R.M. Taylor, and R. Superfine. “Ultrathin self-as-sembled
fibrin sheets,” Proc. of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008, 105
(49): 19438-43.
Peck, T.M., M.C. Whitton, and H. Fuchs. “Evalu-ation
of Reorientation Techniques for Walking in
Large Virtual Environments,” Proc. of IEEE Virtual
Reality, Reno, NV, 2008, 121-127.
Quammen, C. W., A. C. Richardson, J. Haase, B.
Harrison, R. M. Taylor II, and K. S. Bloom. “Fluo-roSim:
A Visual Problem-Solving Environment for
Fluorescence Microscopy,” Proc. of the Eurographics
Workshop on Visual Computing for Biomedicine, Delft,
Netherlands, Oct. 6-7, 2008, 150-158.
Sonnenwald, D.J., M.C. Whitton, and K. Maglaugh-lin
(2008). “Evaluation of a scientific collaboratory
system: Investigating a collaboratory’s potential be-fore
deployment,” in G. Olsen, A. Simmerson, and
M. Bos (Eds.) Scientific Collaboration on the Internet,
pp.171-194. Boston: MIT Press.
Spero, R.C., L. Vicci, J. Cribb, D. Bober, V. Swami-nathan,
E.T. O’Brien, S.L. Rogers, and R. Superfine.
“High throughput system for magnetic manipula-tion
of cells, polymers, and biomaterials,” Review of
Scientific Instruments, 2008, 79 (8): 083707.
Tang, M., Y.J. Kim, and D. Manocha. “C2A: Con-trolled
Conservative Advancement for Interactive
Continuous Collision Detection,” IEEE Conference
on Robotics and Automation, 2009.
van den Berg, J., J. Sewall, M.C. Lin, and D. Mano-cha.
“Virtualized Traffic: Reconstructing Traffic
Flows from Discrete Spatio-Temporal Data,” IEEE
VR, 2009.
Wang, X., Z. Li, J. Y. Choi, J. Xu, M.K. Reiter, and
C. Kil. “Fast and black-box exploit detection and
signature generation for commodity software,”
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security,
2008, 12 (2).
Whitton, M.C., and F.P. Brooks (2008). “Evaluating
VE Component Technologies,” in D. Schmorrow,
J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series Eds), D. Nich-olson,
D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn (Vol. Eds.) The
PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training
and Education: Vol.2. VE Components and Training
Technologies, pp. 240-261. Westport, CN: Praeger
Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and J. Wendt (2008). “Section Per-spective
Appendix A: Modeling and Rendering,” in
D. Schmorrow, J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series
Eds); D. Nicholson, D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn
(Vol. Eds.) The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environ-ments
for Training and Education: Vol.2. VE Compo-nents
and Training Technologies, pp.15-20. Westport,
CN: Praeger Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and R.B. Loftin (2008). “Section
Perspective: VE Component Technologies,” in D.
Schmorrow, J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series Eds),
D. Nicholson, D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn (Vol.
Eds.) The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for
Training and Education: Vol.2. VE Components and
Training Technologies, pp.1-14. Westport, CN: Prae-ger
Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and S. Razzaque (2008). “Locomo-tion,”
in P. Kortum (Ed.) HCI Beyond the GUI: Design
for Haptic, Speech, Olfactory and Other Nontraditional
Interfaces, pp 107-146. Burlington, MA: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Yen T.-F., and M.K. Reiter. “Traffic aggregation for
malware detection,” Detection of Intrusions and Mal-ware,
and Vulnerability Assessment, 5th International
Conference, DIMVA 2008 (Lecture Notes in Com-puter
Science 5137), July 2008, 207-227.
Zhang, L., S.M. LaValle, and D. Manocha. “Global
Vector Field Computation for Feedback Motion
Planning,” IEEE International Conference on Ro-botics
and Automation (ICRA), 2009.
7
Department News
NEW FACULTY APPOINTMENTS
Ron Alterovitz is an Assistant Pro-fessor
who joins us from UC Berkely
and the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer
Center where he was an NIH Postdoc-toral
Research Fellow. You can read
more about Ron on page 2.
Dinggang Shen is an Adjunct Asso-ciate
Professor. Dinggang is an Asso-ciate
Professor in Radiology and the
Biomedical Research Imaging Center
(BRIC) at UNC.
VISITING RESEARCHERS
Kenneth Manly is a Visiting Research
Professor working with Leonard Mc-
Millan. Kenneth is a Professor of Bio-statistics
at the State University of
New York at Buffalo.
John McHugh is a Visiting Professor
working with the computer security
research group. John is Professor and
Canada Research Chair in Privacy and
Security and Director of the Privacy
and Security Laboratory at Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada. He previously worked in our
department in the early 1990s.
THANKS AND FAREWELL
Charlie Bauserman, Systems Manag-er,
left the department in March 2009.
Jeannie M. Walsh, Senior Lecturer and
Director of General Studies, retired at
the end of the fall 2008 semester. Jean-nie
had been with the deparment since
1986, when she started as a research as-sociate
and publications director.
CONGRATULATIONS
Martin Styner, Research Assistant
Professor, was recently promoted to
Assistant Professor, tenure-track, in
the Department of Psychiatry, in the
UNC School of Medicine.
Michael Reiter (B.S.M.Sci. 1989),
Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished
Professor, was named a fellow of the
Association for Computing Machin-ery
(ACM) in fall 2008. Michael was
recognized for his innovations in com-puter
security.
James Anderson, Professor, received
an IBM Real-Time Innovation Award
titled Supporting Real-Time Contain-ers
on Multicore Platforms in Linux.
NEW PATENTS
Pat. No.: 7,385,708 - Methods and sys-tems
for laser based real-time struc-tured
light depth extraction. Inven-tors:
Jeremy D. Ackerman, Kurtis P.
Keller.
Pat. No.: 7,447,209 - Methods, systems,
and computer program products for
modeling and simulating application-level
traffic characteristics in a network
based on transport and network layer
header information. Inventors: Kevin
Jeffay, Felix Hernandez-Campos, F.
Donelson Smith, Andrew B. Nobel
RECENT GRANTS
CAREER: Similarity-based Represen-tation
of Large-scale Image Collec-tions.
PI: Svetlana Lazebnik. National
Science Foundation.
CAREER: Towards Effective Identifi-cation
of Application Behaviors in En-crypted
Traffic. PI: Fabian Monrose.
National Science Foundation. (Trans-ferred
from Johns Hopkins University)
New Frameworks for Detecting and
Minimizing Information Leakage in
Anonymized Network Data. PI: Fa-bian
Monrose. Co-PI: Michael Reiter.
Johns Hopkins University (Prime: US
Department of Homeland Security).
Morphormics Research Grant. PI: Ste-phen
Pizer. Morphormics.
Tim Quigg’s Research Administra-tion
for Scientists class has made
an entrance into the Kenan-Flagler
Business School. The Center for En-trepreneurial
Studies offers an enter-prise-
creation track in its Graduate
Certificate program, and Quigg’s class
opens a window into the world of sci-ence
research and lab management for
those students.
Currently aimed at science PhD stu-dents,
post-doctoral researchers and
young professors, COMP 918 gives
a thorough introduction to writing
grant proposals. It goes on to cover
management of research grants and
contracts, as well as intellectual prop-erty,
technology transfer, and conflict-of-
interest policies. Guest lecturers
in Quigg’s previous classes have in-cluded
Hamilton Brown, Proposal
Management Director in the Office
Kenan-Flagler Entrepreneurs Invited into COMP 918
of Sponsored Research, Trude Amick,
Assistant Director for the Office of
Technology Development, and patent
lawyer Greg Hunt. Graduate students
in various sciences have been repre-sented
in earlier classes, and he looks
forward to the questions that business
entrepreneurs will bring.
The Graduate Certificate program can
last 18 months or two years. Students
must take a semester-long Introduc-tion
to Entrepreneurship class in Ar-tistic,
Life Science, Science or Social
Entrepreneurship. COMP 918 will
serve as the Science option. Certificate
students then can choose one of three
tracks: the Commercial sequence, the
Enterprise-creation sequence, which
involves labs and hands-on experi-ence,
or the Literacy sequence, which
is more classroom based and requires
a capstone paper or business plan.
Each sequence requires two addition-al
graduate electives. Students in the
certificate program have included un-dergraduates,
graduates and several
MD-PhD students.
MaryAnn O’Neill, program director
for the Center for Entrepreneurial
Studies, was intrigued by the syllabus.
“This will give students from all fields
a serious look into science manage-ment,”
she says. “It calls for a differ-ent
kind of thinking, and it will help
our Launching the Venture students
be more prepared if their enterprises
need research funding or if they head
toward patent applications.”
Quigg is pleased with the cross-de-partment
connection. “I’m delighted
that we’ll have business students add-ing
to our class discussions. The more
viewpoints, the better.”
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Throughout News & Notes, we list
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M.S., and Ph.D. Computer Science
and Math Sciences alumni.
News Notes
Professor Anselmo Lastra attended the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 conference in Singapore and
met up with a few alums and old friends there. Pictured from left to right: Jason Yang, Justin
Hensley (Ph.D. 2007), Mark Harris (Ph.D. 2003), Professor Anselmo Lastra, and Sung-Eui Yoon
(Ph.D. 2005).

News Notes S p r i n g 2 0 0 9 􀀁􀄠 I s s u e F o r t y - t h r e e C omp S c i @ C a r o l i n a
In this issue
1 The Rise of Robotics
2 Meet Ron Alterovitz
3 LITMUSRT
4 Alumni Profile - Aaron
Fulkerson, B.S. 2004
5 Alumni News
6 Recent Publications
7 Department News
Dear Friends,
The academic year is drawing to a close. Soon we will award degrees to another set of graduates and send
them on their way into a challenging economy. We have also recently extended our graduate admissions
deadline for fall 2009 to May 31. It is our hope that this will give Triangle locals in the technology industry
the option of getting an advanced degree should they find themselves out of work.
The number of undergraduate students we are teaching is growing rapidly, up 30 per cent over the last
three years. This comes at a time when we’re losing faculty to retirement, making it challenging to meet
our undergraduate teaching demands. We said farewell to Jeannie Walsh, Senior Lecturer and Director of
General Studies, at the end of the fall 2008 semester.
This spring we welcomed Assistant Professor Ron Alterovitz to the department. Ron is part of our expanding robotics group
and joins us from UC Berkely and the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center where he was an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
You can read more about Ron on page 2, and more about our robotics research below.
We were very proud to learn that our own Michael Reiter had been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
last fall. Mike was recognized for his innovations in the field of computer security.
In this issue of News & Notes, we’re introducing a new feature - an extended alumni profile. Be sure to check out the story about
B.S. alum Aaron Fulkerson on page 4. Interested in being the subject of the alumni profile in a future News & Notes? Send an
email to pubs@cs.unc.edu.
On a final note, this is the last edition of News & Notes for me as department chairman. I am happy to announce that Anselmo
Lastra will be named chairman effective July 1, 2009. Many great things have happened in the past five years and it has been a
pleasure to serve the department as chair. I know that Anselmo will do a fine job leading the department.
Have a great summer!
Robot algorithms have been studied in the
Computer Science Department for a de-cade,
but they’ve developed a higher pro-file
recently. “We’ve been paying more at-tention
to robotics in the last three to four
years,” says Dr. Dinesh Manocha. The triad
of Dr. Ming Lin, Dr. Ron Alterovitz and
Manocha form the core of the Robotics re-search
group.
“Robot Algorithms refer to a broad set of
computational methods that has been de-signed
for physical objects in the real world.
They primarily deal with issues related to
spatial arrangement of objects, task plan-ning,
and geometric reasoning, and they’re
characterized by their physical complexi-ty,”
he explains. “We’ve worked on collision
checking, motion planning, robotic simula-tion,
and multi-robot coordination. We’re
also working in multi-agent and crowd
simulations and now traffic simulation,
which are emerging applications of robot
algorithms. Along with a postdoc, Jur van
den Berg, many graduate students, and the
addition of Ron, we have reached a critical
mass to start a new robotics lab for both
research and educational purposes.” Many
graduate students, including Liangjun
Zhang and Russell Gayle, have developed
new robot motion-planning algorithms as
part of their PhD dissertations.
Alterovitz, whose work is focused on link-ing
medical image analysis to medical ro-bots,
is setting up a work station in the
western half of the Sitterson graphics lab,
as the new robotics lab will be shared by
multiple faculty members. The remaining
area is being freshly deployed as a large
area for multiple-robot coordination, which
will include several cameras mounted for
tracking their movements. Graduate stu-
The Rise of Robotics
continued on page 2
News Notes News Notes 3
Dr. Ron Altero-vitz,
who joined
the faculty in
January, brings
a new strength
to the depart-ment,
linking
medical imaging
more closely to
robotic hardware
through physi-cally
based simu-lations
and motion planning.
“Medical imaging is more precise than
it’s ever been,” he explains. “We often
can see quite clearly where the goal is,
plus the obstacles, such as small vessels
and nerves. In parallel, there have been
a lot of developments in robotic hard-ware.
My work is in the middle, the
algorithms for motion planning. I take
information from medical images and
turn it into actions for robots to per-form.”
Alterovitz earned his PhD at Berkeley
in 2006 in Industrial Engineering and
Operations Research. He spent a year
in Toulouse, France, with the Robotics
and AI group at LAAS-CNRS (Nation-al
Center for Scientific Research) before
returning to Berkeley as an NIH Post-doctoral
Research Fellow, conducting
research in conjunction with the UCSF
Comprehensive Cancer Center.
One of the primary medical applica-tions
he has focused on is brachythera-py,
a treatment for prostate cancer that
involves inserting radioactive “seeds”
near the cancer in the prostate. The
challenge has been how to implant the
seeds accurately in deformable tissue.
“Brachytherapy has a fairly high suc-cess
rate, but there are side effects if the
seeds are misplaced,” he says. He writes
programs for physically based simula-tions,
and then develops planners to
improve the quality of the procedure.
In addition, Alterovitz has been ad-dressing
the problem from the hard-ware
side. His work at Berkeley in-cluded
research leading to a group
patent application for a “steerable
needle,” a highly flexible needle made
of Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and tita-nium.
Its beveled tip causes it to curve
when penetrating soft tissue, enabling
the placement of seeds in previously
unreachable locations. The steerable
Ron Alterovitz: A Link Between Medical Imaging and Robotics
2
dents Stephen Guy and Jamie Snape
have been studying the use of disc-shaped
Roombas robotics toolkits for
teaching courses in robotics and per-forming
research in multi-robot coor-dination
and planning.
“More research projects are possible
because of this new robotics lab,” says
Manocha. “And it will be used both
for research and teaching, as well as
showing various demonstrations.”
The current offerings in robotics in-clude
two graduate courses, An In-troduction
to Robotics and Robot
Motion Planning, which are taught at
different times by Lin and Manocha.
Alterovitz is currently teaching a new
graduate class, Medical Robotics and
Simulation. They intend to add an un-dergraduate
class for junior and senior
computer science majors.
Manocha’s primary research is in
broad-area robotic algorithms for sim-ulation
projects funded by National
Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Army
Research Office, and RDECOM. Lin
currently also has an NSF grant joint-ly
with the University of Maryland,
University of Wisconsin, and Drex-el
University. This project proposes
to use current Cyber-Infrastructure
with a focused domain
on bio-inspired robotics
to implement a multi-disciplinary
educational
program in Engineering
Informatics, which refers
to the science of repre-sentation,
simulation, ar-chiving,
and reuse of en-gineering
knowledge in
transformative ways. The
design and realization
of bio-inspired robots
require knowledge from
multiple domains (e.g.,
software, algorithms, me-chanical
structure, elec-tronics);
different types
of individual engineering
models and simulations
need to be integrated to-gether
to support the de-sign
process.
“Based on our early re-sults,
the excitement
associated with bio-in-spired
robots has attract-ed
students of different
backgrounds to use in-formation
technology for better engi-neering
design,” says Lin. “In addition
to its tremendous potential for a wide
range of services to the society, we
believe robotics can also provide some
engaging hands-on experiences and a
fascinating physical context to attract
more bright students into studying
computer science and advancing the
field of computing.”
The Rise of Robotics, continued from page 1
continued on page 3
The image above shows the use of motion planning for medical
applications: path computation for liver chemoembolization.
continued on page 3
3
LITMUSRT is one of the latest projects
being worked on by the Real-Time Sys-tems
group, led by Professors Jim An-derson
and Sanjoy Baruah.
LITMUSRT is an extension of the Li-nux
kernel produced at UNC. Currently
maintained by graduate student Bjoern
Brandenburg, LITMUSRT’s purpose is
to serve as a testbed for prototyping ad-vanced
multiprocessor real-time sched-uling
and synchronization algorithms.
It allows researchers to investigate real-world
limitations and the impact of over-heads
on system performance, which is
difficult to do with just theory.
For example, in a case study on the
scalability of real-time scheduling al-gorithms
on large multicore platforms
such as SUN’s UltraSPARC, it was
found that “staggering” timer inter-rupts
across cores can greatly help to
reduce bus contention. In experiments
using LITMUSRT on an 2x4 core In-tel
Nehalem system, it was shown that
cache-aware real-time schedulers can
significantly reduce cache-thrashing in
a video player.
Work on LITMUSRT started in 2006,
and a number of graduate students
have contributed to the project over the
years. So far, nine papers have been pub-lished
that report on LITMUSRT-related
research. Anderson is also supervising
an undergraduate honors thesis that is
related to the project.
LITMUSRT is publicly available at
www.cs.unc.edu/~anderson/litmus-rt/.
The published code has been used by
researchers in Asia, Europe and North
America.
Research funding for LITMUSRT comes
from IBM, SUN, Intel Corporation, the
National Science Foundation and the
Army Research Office.
LITMUSRT - LInux Testbed for MUltiprocessor Scheduling in Real-Time systems
Ron Alterovitz, continued from page 2
Logo designed by Jasper McChesney
In addition to innovative curriculum de-velopment
using the state-of-art research
in robotics, Lin and Manocha have also
received support from Intel and Micro-soft
for some of the applications areas
such as crowd simulation. For example,
as part of a joint collaboration, UNC and
Intel researchers have developed a new
approach that can exploit the capabili-ties
of many-core processors to develop
a highly parallel multi-agent simulation
algorithm.
Alterovitz, in his first semester at Caro-lina,
is working on making connections
in the UNC Hospital network to estab-lish
collaborations with which he can
build on his previous research (see his
profile on page 2).
Robotics is a serious field with a mul-titude
of critical functions in medicine
and industry. But because of its long
history in science fiction, it also engen-ders
a sense of fun. This mood can be
found in Robotics Club, which is led by
Lin and usually attracts a dozen or so
undergraduate students in a semester.
In their informal gatherings, they have
built wall-climbing robots and pro-grammed
them to navigate around ob-stacles.
New faces, new ideas, and the sound of
a herd of Roombas will soon attract
even more students into this fascinating
discipline within computer science. The
new robotics lab has room for them.
The Rise of Robotics, continued from page 2
Real-Time Systems Update
A primary area of research for the
department’s Real-Time Systems
group is the development of operat-ing-
systems infrastructure for sup-porting
real-time applications on
multicore platforms. Such applica-tions
might be found, for example,
in gaming systems, multimedia
systems and control systems in air-craft.
The group is currently working with
global security company Northrop
Grumman Corporation to determine
the viability of using multicore plat-forms
in real-time control systems in
unmanned aerial vehicles. The major
challenge in this effort lies in devising
techniques for “isolating” different
system components so that the real-time
correctness of different compo-nents
can be validated independently.
Validating real-time correctness is a
key part of the overall process of cer-tifying
an aircraft design. Certifica-tion
becomes much simpler if smaller
sub-systems can be analyzed inde-pendently.
needle was developed with mechanical
engineers at Johns Hopkins University.
Alterovitz expects to build on that re-search
at UNC with new collaborations.
He’s making connections with Drs. Ed-ward
Chaney and Julian Rosenmann in
Radiation Oncology to explore new ap-plications
for the steerable needle and
other minimally invasive devices. “We’re
looking at prostate cancer and other
types of cancer,” he says. “Breast and
pancreatic cancer might be next.” He’s
also met with engineers at N.C. State to
discuss ideas on the robotic hardware
side. “The next step would be extensions
of the steerable needle. A key challenge is
to develop a device for which all electri-cal
components are outside the body, but
that is capable of following curved paths
inside the body.”
Inside the Department are more paths
of collaboration. Alterovtiz sees a natu-ral
hardware collaborator in the Applied
Engineering Lab, and looks forward to
new research in physically based simu-lations
and motion planning with Drs.
Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha.
This semester, he’s teaching COMP 790-
099, Medical Robotics and Simulation,
and learning about Chapel Hill. He and
his wife, Sheyna, arrived from Berkeley
in December. She is finishing her the-sis
for a master’s degree in gerontology
from San Francisco State University and
intends to pursue advocacy on behalf of
older adults.
“Both Sheyna and I have liked it here a lot
so far. Everyone is friendly—we’re used
to the brusque atmosphere of California.
Chapel Hill has a nice balance that I’m
appreciating.”
News Notes News Notes 5
Aaron Fulkerson (BS 2004) says he
was delusional when he thought he
could get a computer science degree
at UNC. He had a high school GPA
of 1.67 and had been backpacking for
nearly four years. He wasn’t an admis-sions
office dream, but the ideal can-didate
rarely succeeds the way Fulker-son
has. His company, MindTouch, has
28 employees and clients that include
Intel, UCLA Law School and the U.S.
Department of Defense, and it’s been
featured in the New York Times, Wall
Street Journal and “every tech publica-tion
that matters.”
Fulkerson’s travels had brought him to
Minnesota and a series of short-term
technology jobs. He decided he wanted
a computer science degree and he con-cluded
he wanted to study in the pro-gram
Fred Brooks had created. That’s
when a level of effort and creativity not
indicated by a 1.67 GPA kicked in.
“I told my wife to look for a job in
North Carolina and we’d move there
and I’d go to UNC,” says Fulkerson.
“She went to a teaching job fair in Dur-ham
the next weekend and was hired
on the spot. We moved and I started at
Durham Tech.” The new student buck-led
down and simultaneously launched
community-service non-profits in
public housing areas of Durham, us-ing
refurbished computers to teach
with technology. His service work and
his A.S. degree attracted a recruiter
from N.C. State, but Fulkerson heard
only the siren song of UNC’s CS Dept.
He liked its focus on mathematics and
theory. “Lots of people can program,”
Fulkerson says, “but not everyone
knows why they can do it.” His per-sistence
garnered him a champion in
the admissions office and a $30,000/
year Jack Kent Cook scholarship, and
he became a Carolina student in 2002
without ever taking an SAT.
Fulkerson concentrated on web devel-opment
and software engineering “be-cause
I wanted to focus on what I could
make a business out of.” His academic
mentor was Kevin Jeffay, Gillian Cell
Distinguished Professor and Director
Alumni Profile - MindTouch Deki: A Blockbuster Built on Open Source Software
of Undergraduate Stud-ies.
“I adopted Kevin as
my advisor,” he says. “He
had a big impact on my
success in school.” The
success of his business he
credits in great part to
Professor Diane Pozefsky
(PhD 1979). “During my
last year, she was helping
me plan it and avoid po-tential
pitfalls. She’d say,
‘What’s the problem we’re
solving?’ ‘How are we dif-ferentiating
this product?’
I often bounced ideas off
her and she gave me a lot historical
perspective, input on how to position
a company and market it. She has a lot
to do with the success of it.”
So what’s the problem MindTouch
(www.mindtouch.com) is solving? “Any
modern organization has a difficult
time getting access to information,
sharing and collaborating. We all are
too familiar with the many different
media types and formats and discon-nected
systems that creates a snarl
of data silos we’re forced to tediously
navigate daily at work,” explains Fulk-erson.
“So, at MindTouch we developed
an easy-to-use, web-based application
that is a lot like a simple word proces-sor,
but rather than just text, you can
add images, video, audio, feeds, data-base
queries, web services, etc. Ev-erything
is versioned, the content is
updated real-time from other systems
and databases and, most importantly,
anyone can edit. MindTouch is the
glue that bridges common application
and data silos and if you’re familiar
with wikis, you’ll recognize this as
something very wiki-like in its ease of
use.”
Fulkerson met his partner, Steve Bjorg,
during a 2003 internship at Micro-soft,
where they worked in the office
of the CTO on distributed systems re-search.
After he graduated from UNC
in 2004, Fulkerson and his wife moved
back to Minnesota, and he worked
steadily with Bjorg and two program-mers,
each of whom was in a different
state. “We were a distributed system.
We talked at midnight every Monday.”
They went live in January 2005.
Fulkerson defines his company as “an
open-source enterprise collaboration
and community platform that enables
users to connect and remix enterprise
applications, data sources and web
services.” They give away the open-source
software, making money when
users of the free version come back for
the more stable, licensed version that
is further tested and offers more fea-tures.
An example is whorunsgov.com, a
product of the Washington Post. “It’s a
moderated wiki that journalists at the
paper use and you can contribute to—
and all content is being pulled in from
outside sources.”
Now based in San Diego, MindTouch
is on a strong upward trajectory. “The
product is not yet three years old,”
Fulkerson says, “and we have hun-dreds
of thousands of installations and
many millions of users.” The client list
includes high tech, government and
university customers such as Mozilla,
Microsoft, NIH and the Harvard Law
School.
Has Fulkerson any advice for oth-ers
starting businesses? “It’s what I
learned from Diane Pozefsky: The
team is critically important. You’ve
got to have resonance with your team
from day zero. Also, seek out smart
people and learn as much as you can
from them.”
4
3
M.S. AND PH.D. ALUMNI
J. Michael Fitzpatrick (MS 1982),
professor of computer science, com-puter
engineering and electrical en-gineering
at the Vanderbilt School of
Engineering, was named a Fellow of
SPIE, the International Society for
Optical Engineering, in 2008. In ad-dition
to his position in the School of
Engineering, Mike is co-director of
the Electrical Engineering and Com-puter
Science Medical Image Process-ing
Laboratory at Vanderbilt. His cur-rent
work focuses on medical imaging
and image processing, image regis-tration,
magnetic resonance imaging,
and image guidance for ear surgery
and neurosurgery. (jmf@eecsmail.vuse.
vanderbilt.edu)
Yen-Ping Shan’s (PhD 1990) com-pany,
iSource Technologies, provided
substantial consulting services to the
Beijing Olympics. Experts in a wide
variety of fields (e.g. Water treatment,
traffic management) were brought
in from all over the world to help.
(ypshan@bizwoh.rr.com)
Ritu Chadha (PhD 1991) was elected
a Telcordia fellow in 2008 and is cur-rently
leading a large contract award-ed
to Telcordia by the US Army relat-ed
to ad hoc network management. A
podcast about this work can be heard
at: telephonyonline.com/podcasts/ad-hoc-mobile-
network-1114/. Ritu has also
recently published several papers, in-cluding:
Chiang, C.-Y. J., R. Chadha, S. Newman, R.
Orlando, K. Jakubowski, and R. Lo. “Build-ing
a versatile testbed for supporting testing
and tactical network management tools and
their interoperability,” Proc. of IEEE MIL-COM
2008, San Diego, CA, November 17-19,
2008.
Kant, L., and R. Chadha. “MANET Manage-ment:
Industry Challenges & Potential Solu-tions,”
Proc of the 9th International Symposium
on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia
Networks, Newport Beach CA, June 2008.
(chadha@research.telcordia.com)
After living in the RTP area for more
than 12 years, Kah-Chan (KC) Low
(MS 1991) moved to Marshalls Creek,
Penn., right across from New Jersey,
in December 2007 so that his two
boys (thelowbrothers.com) can further
their music education at the Pre-Col-lege
Division of The Juilliard School.
He says he badly misses the nice and
mild non-winters of North Carolina!
(kahchanlow@yahoo.com)
Ronald Azuma (PhD 1995) is now a
Research Leader at a new laboratory:
the Nokia Research Center Holly-wood,
in Santa Monica, Calif. He will
be building and leading a team to de-velop
novel compelling Mixed Real-ity
experiences on mobile platforms.
(azuma@acm.org)
Rich Holloway (PhD 1995) has joined
numerous other UNC CS folks at
Morphormics, Inc. (www.morphormics.
com) He is taking over the job of VP
of Product Development from Lee
Nackman (PhD 1982), who has been
serving as the interim VP-PD since
mid-2008 (as mentioned in the fall
2008 News & Notes). Rich and his wife
Barbara still live in Chapel Hill with
their 4 children (Alexa-15, Bergen-12,
Lizzie-10, and Cole-5), a dog, 2 cats,
and a green snake. (richard.l.holloway@
gmail.com)
Jeff Hultquist (MS 1986, PhD 1995)
is now writing games for the iPhone.
Demonstration videos are on his web
site, NotebookPress.com. (jhultquist@
mac.com)
Megan Dunigan (MS 2004) was
named to the inaugural Southern Con-ference
Hall of Fame for her success in
women’s tennis. She was also named to
the Furman University Athletics Hall
of Fame in 2007 as the most decorat-ed
women’s tennis player in Southern
Conference history, having received
four league Player of the Year awards.
Brad Davis (PhD 2008) received the
2009 Linda Dykstra Distinguished
Dissertation Award in Math, Physical
Sciences & Engineering, which rec-ognizes
the scholarly contributions of
UNC-Chapel Hill doctoral students
as revealed through their disserta-tion
projects and highlights the timely
completion of doctoral training. Brad’s
dissertation was on Medical Image
Analysis via Fréchet Means of Diffeo-morphisms.
(brad.davis@kitware.com)
Kyle Moore (MS 2008) is working for
SportsMEDIA Technology Corpora-tion
in Durham, NC. (kylejessemoore@
gmail.com)
Sashi Kumar Penta (MS 2008) is
working for the Visual Computing
Group at Intel Corporation on the Lar-rabee
project. (sashikumar@gmail.com)
UNDERGRADUATE ALUMNI
Mark Hutchinson (BSMSci 1981) was
“promoted” to a Zone Advisor at experts-exchange.
com, and wrote an article,
Getting a Better Answer, that appeared
in the October 1, 2008, Experts-Ex-change
newsletter: www.ee-stuff.com/
Newsl et t er/100108newsl et t e r.htm
(aikimark@aol.com)
Courtney McCarthy Ramey (BSMSci
2002) recently accepted a position as a
Director with Jabian Consulting in At-lanta,
Ga. (courtney.ramey@gmail.com)
Jaime Vega (BS 2005) works with
Lulu.com as a Software Engineer.
(jvega@lulu.com)
FORMER FACULTY
In April 2008, former faculty member
Akira Nakamura was decorated with
the Order of the Sacred Treasure from
the Emperor for his longtime teaching
work in the university and outstanding
research. (an1206@ad.cyberhome.ne.jp)
FAMILY MATTERS
Alan Forrest, Windows Systems Ad-ministrator,
married Julie Serdensky
on December 24, 2008, in Hillsbor-ough,
NC. ( forrest@cs.unc.edu)
David Gotz (PhD 2005) and his wife,
Anne, welcomed Sarah Paige Gotz on
December 28, 2009, in Mount Kisco,
NY. (dave@gotzfamily.org)
Christopher Sheldahl, graduate stu-dent,
and his wife, Angela, welcomed
Alexander John Sheldahl on January 2,
2009, in Chapel Hill, NC. (csheldahl@
earthlink.net)
Kyle Moore (MS 2008) married Kim-berly
Williams on January 31, 2009, in
Columbus, Ohio. (kylejessemore@gmail.
com)
Professor Steve Weiss and his wife,
Iris, welcomed a grandchild, Kyle
Aaron Weiss, on February 1, 2009, in
Fairfax, Va. Kyle’s parents are Heather
and Jeremy Weiss. (weiss@cs.unc.edu)
5
6 News Notes News Notes 7
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Ballard, L., S. Kamara, F. Monrose and M.K. Reiter.
“Towards practical biometric key generation with
randomized biometric templates,” Proc. of the 15th
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
Security, October 2008, 235–244.
Bauer, L., S. Garriss and M.K. Reiter. “Detecting
and resolving policy misconfigurations in access-control
systems,” Proc. of the 13th ACM Symposium
on Access Control Models and Technologies, June 2008,
185-194.
Brandenburg, B., and J. Anderson. “A Comparison
of the M-PCP, D-PCP, and FMLP on LITMUS-RT,”
Proc. of the 12th International Conference on
Principles of Distributed Systems, Luxor, Egypt,
Springer Verlag, December 2008, 105-124.
Brandenburg, B., J. Calandrino, and J. Anderson.
“On the Scalability of Real-Time Scheduling Al-gorithms
on Multicore Platforms: A Case Study,”
Proc. of the 29th IEEE Real-Time Systems Sympo-sium,
Barcelona, Spain, IEEE Computer Society
Press, December 2008, 157-169.
Desai, K.V., T.G. Bishop, L. Vicci, E.T. O’Brien,
R.M. Taylor, and R. Superfine. “Agnostic particle
tracking for three-dimensional motion of cellular
granules and membrane-tethered bead dynamics,”
Biophysical Journal, 2008, 94 (6): 2374-84.
Dinan, J., S. Olivier, G. Sabin, J. Prins, P. Sadayap-pan,
and C.-W. Tseng. “A Message Passing Bench-mark
for Unbalanced Applications,” Simulation
Modelling Practice and Theory, October 2008, 16 (9):
1177-1189.
Feasel, J., M.C. Whitton, and J.D. Wendt. “LLCM-WIP:
Low Latency, Continuous -Motion Walking-
In-Place,” Proc. of IEEE Symposium on 3D User In-terfaces,
2008, 97-104.
Feng, D., Y. Lee, L. Kwock, and R.M.Taylor. “Mul-tivariate
Scalar Volume Visualization for Relation-ship
and Value Estimation,” Transactions on Visual-ization
and Computer Graphics, 2008.
Galoppo, N., M.A. Otaduy, W. Moss, J. Sewall, S.
Curtis, M.C. Lin. “Controlling Deformable Mate-rial
with Dynamic Morph Targets,” ACM SIG-GRAPH
Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and
Games, 2009.
Gao, D., M.K. Reiter and D. Song. “BinHunt: Au-tomatically
finding semantic differences in binary
programs,” Information and Communications Security,
10th International Conference, ICICS 2008 (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5308), October 2008,
238–255.
Gayle, R., W. Moss, M.C. Lin, and D. Manocha.
“Multi-Robot Coordination using Generalized So-cial
Potential Fields,” IEEE Conference on Robotics
and Automation, 2009.
Jerald, J., T.M. Peck, F. Steinicke, and M.C. Whit-ton.
“Sensitivity to Scene Motion for Phases of
Head Yaws,” Proc. of Applied Perception in Graphics
and Visualization, 2008.
Lauterbach, C., M.C. Lin, D. Manocha, S. Borkman,
E. LaFave, and M. Bauer. “Accelerating Line-of-
Sight Computations in Large OneSAF Terrains
with Dynamic Events,” I/ITSEC 2008, 2008.
Lauterbach, C., M. Garland, S. Sengupta, D. Lu-ebke,
and D. Manocha. “Fast BVH construction on
GPUs,” Eurographics 2009, 2009.
Leontyev, H., and J. Anderson. “A Unified Hard/
Soft Real-Time Schedulability Test for Global EDF
Multiprocessor Scheduling,” Proc. of the 29th IEEE
Real-Time Systems Symposium, Barcelona, Spain,
IEEE Computer Society Press, December 2008,
375-384.
Li, Z., X. Wang, Z. Liang, and M.K. Reiter. “AGIS:
Towards automatic generation of infection signa-tures,”
Proc. of the 38th IEEE/IFIP International
Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, June
2008, 237-246.
Lloyd, B., N. Govindaraju, C. Quammen, S. Molnar,
and D. Manocha. “Logarithmic Perspective Shadow
Maps,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2008, 27 (4).
McCune, J.M., A. Perrig and M.K. Reiter. “Safe pas-sage
for passwords and other sensitive data,” Proc. of
the 16th ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Secu-rity
Symposium, February 2009, 301–320.
McCune, J.M., A. Perrig and M.K. Reiter. “Seeing-is-
believing: Using camera-phones for human-verifiable
authentication,” International Journal on
Security and Networks, 2009, 4 (1-2): 43-56.
Merideth, M.G., and M.K. Reiter. “Write mark-ers
for probabilistic quorum systems,” Principles of
Distributed Systems, 12th International Conference,
OPODIS 2008 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Vol. 5401), December 2008, 5–21.
Mihalik, J.P., L. Kohli, and M.C. Whitton. “Do the
physical characteristics of a virtual reality device
contraindicate its use for balance assessment?”
Journal of Sport Rehabilitation, 2008, 17 (1): 38-49.
O’Brien, E.T., J. Cribb, D. Marshburn, R.M. Taylor,
and R. Superfine. “Chapter 16: Magnetic manipula-tion
for force measurements in cell biology,” Meth-ods
in Cell Biology, 2008, 89: 433-50.
O’Brien, E.T., M.R. Falvo, D. Millard, B. Eastwood,
R.M. Taylor, and R. Superfine. “Ultrathin self-as-sembled
fibrin sheets,” Proc. of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008, 105
(49): 19438-43.
Peck, T.M., M.C. Whitton, and H. Fuchs. “Evalu-ation
of Reorientation Techniques for Walking in
Large Virtual Environments,” Proc. of IEEE Virtual
Reality, Reno, NV, 2008, 121-127.
Quammen, C. W., A. C. Richardson, J. Haase, B.
Harrison, R. M. Taylor II, and K. S. Bloom. “Fluo-roSim:
A Visual Problem-Solving Environment for
Fluorescence Microscopy,” Proc. of the Eurographics
Workshop on Visual Computing for Biomedicine, Delft,
Netherlands, Oct. 6-7, 2008, 150-158.
Sonnenwald, D.J., M.C. Whitton, and K. Maglaugh-lin
(2008). “Evaluation of a scientific collaboratory
system: Investigating a collaboratory’s potential be-fore
deployment,” in G. Olsen, A. Simmerson, and
M. Bos (Eds.) Scientific Collaboration on the Internet,
pp.171-194. Boston: MIT Press.
Spero, R.C., L. Vicci, J. Cribb, D. Bober, V. Swami-nathan,
E.T. O’Brien, S.L. Rogers, and R. Superfine.
“High throughput system for magnetic manipula-tion
of cells, polymers, and biomaterials,” Review of
Scientific Instruments, 2008, 79 (8): 083707.
Tang, M., Y.J. Kim, and D. Manocha. “C2A: Con-trolled
Conservative Advancement for Interactive
Continuous Collision Detection,” IEEE Conference
on Robotics and Automation, 2009.
van den Berg, J., J. Sewall, M.C. Lin, and D. Mano-cha.
“Virtualized Traffic: Reconstructing Traffic
Flows from Discrete Spatio-Temporal Data,” IEEE
VR, 2009.
Wang, X., Z. Li, J. Y. Choi, J. Xu, M.K. Reiter, and
C. Kil. “Fast and black-box exploit detection and
signature generation for commodity software,”
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security,
2008, 12 (2).
Whitton, M.C., and F.P. Brooks (2008). “Evaluating
VE Component Technologies,” in D. Schmorrow,
J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series Eds), D. Nich-olson,
D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn (Vol. Eds.) The
PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training
and Education: Vol.2. VE Components and Training
Technologies, pp. 240-261. Westport, CN: Praeger
Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and J. Wendt (2008). “Section Per-spective
Appendix A: Modeling and Rendering,” in
D. Schmorrow, J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series
Eds); D. Nicholson, D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn
(Vol. Eds.) The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environ-ments
for Training and Education: Vol.2. VE Compo-nents
and Training Technologies, pp.15-20. Westport,
CN: Praeger Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and R.B. Loftin (2008). “Section
Perspective: VE Component Technologies,” in D.
Schmorrow, J. Cohn, and D. Nicholson (Series Eds),
D. Nicholson, D. Schmorrow, and J. Cohn (Vol.
Eds.) The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for
Training and Education: Vol.2. VE Components and
Training Technologies, pp.1-14. Westport, CN: Prae-ger
Security International.
Whitton, M.C., and S. Razzaque (2008). “Locomo-tion,”
in P. Kortum (Ed.) HCI Beyond the GUI: Design
for Haptic, Speech, Olfactory and Other Nontraditional
Interfaces, pp 107-146. Burlington, MA: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Yen T.-F., and M.K. Reiter. “Traffic aggregation for
malware detection,” Detection of Intrusions and Mal-ware,
and Vulnerability Assessment, 5th International
Conference, DIMVA 2008 (Lecture Notes in Com-puter
Science 5137), July 2008, 207-227.
Zhang, L., S.M. LaValle, and D. Manocha. “Global
Vector Field Computation for Feedback Motion
Planning,” IEEE International Conference on Ro-botics
and Automation (ICRA), 2009.
7
Department News
NEW FACULTY APPOINTMENTS
Ron Alterovitz is an Assistant Pro-fessor
who joins us from UC Berkely
and the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer
Center where he was an NIH Postdoc-toral
Research Fellow. You can read
more about Ron on page 2.
Dinggang Shen is an Adjunct Asso-ciate
Professor. Dinggang is an Asso-ciate
Professor in Radiology and the
Biomedical Research Imaging Center
(BRIC) at UNC.
VISITING RESEARCHERS
Kenneth Manly is a Visiting Research
Professor working with Leonard Mc-
Millan. Kenneth is a Professor of Bio-statistics
at the State University of
New York at Buffalo.
John McHugh is a Visiting Professor
working with the computer security
research group. John is Professor and
Canada Research Chair in Privacy and
Security and Director of the Privacy
and Security Laboratory at Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada. He previously worked in our
department in the early 1990s.
THANKS AND FAREWELL
Charlie Bauserman, Systems Manag-er,
left the department in March 2009.
Jeannie M. Walsh, Senior Lecturer and
Director of General Studies, retired at
the end of the fall 2008 semester. Jean-nie
had been with the deparment since
1986, when she started as a research as-sociate
and publications director.
CONGRATULATIONS
Martin Styner, Research Assistant
Professor, was recently promoted to
Assistant Professor, tenure-track, in
the Department of Psychiatry, in the
UNC School of Medicine.
Michael Reiter (B.S.M.Sci. 1989),
Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished
Professor, was named a fellow of the
Association for Computing Machin-ery
(ACM) in fall 2008. Michael was
recognized for his innovations in com-puter
security.
James Anderson, Professor, received
an IBM Real-Time Innovation Award
titled Supporting Real-Time Contain-ers
on Multicore Platforms in Linux.
NEW PATENTS
Pat. No.: 7,385,708 - Methods and sys-tems
for laser based real-time struc-tured
light depth extraction. Inven-tors:
Jeremy D. Ackerman, Kurtis P.
Keller.
Pat. No.: 7,447,209 - Methods, systems,
and computer program products for
modeling and simulating application-level
traffic characteristics in a network
based on transport and network layer
header information. Inventors: Kevin
Jeffay, Felix Hernandez-Campos, F.
Donelson Smith, Andrew B. Nobel
RECENT GRANTS
CAREER: Similarity-based Represen-tation
of Large-scale Image Collec-tions.
PI: Svetlana Lazebnik. National
Science Foundation.
CAREER: Towards Effective Identifi-cation
of Application Behaviors in En-crypted
Traffic. PI: Fabian Monrose.
National Science Foundation. (Trans-ferred
from Johns Hopkins University)
New Frameworks for Detecting and
Minimizing Information Leakage in
Anonymized Network Data. PI: Fa-bian
Monrose. Co-PI: Michael Reiter.
Johns Hopkins University (Prime: US
Department of Homeland Security).
Morphormics Research Grant. PI: Ste-phen
Pizer. Morphormics.
Tim Quigg’s Research Administra-tion
for Scientists class has made
an entrance into the Kenan-Flagler
Business School. The Center for En-trepreneurial
Studies offers an enter-prise-
creation track in its Graduate
Certificate program, and Quigg’s class
opens a window into the world of sci-ence
research and lab management for
those students.
Currently aimed at science PhD stu-dents,
post-doctoral researchers and
young professors, COMP 918 gives
a thorough introduction to writing
grant proposals. It goes on to cover
management of research grants and
contracts, as well as intellectual prop-erty,
technology transfer, and conflict-of-
interest policies. Guest lecturers
in Quigg’s previous classes have in-cluded
Hamilton Brown, Proposal
Management Director in the Office
Kenan-Flagler Entrepreneurs Invited into COMP 918
of Sponsored Research, Trude Amick,
Assistant Director for the Office of
Technology Development, and patent
lawyer Greg Hunt. Graduate students
in various sciences have been repre-sented
in earlier classes, and he looks
forward to the questions that business
entrepreneurs will bring.
The Graduate Certificate program can
last 18 months or two years. Students
must take a semester-long Introduc-tion
to Entrepreneurship class in Ar-tistic,
Life Science, Science or Social
Entrepreneurship. COMP 918 will
serve as the Science option. Certificate
students then can choose one of three
tracks: the Commercial sequence, the
Enterprise-creation sequence, which
involves labs and hands-on experi-ence,
or the Literacy sequence, which
is more classroom based and requires
a capstone paper or business plan.
Each sequence requires two addition-al
graduate electives. Students in the
certificate program have included un-dergraduates,
graduates and several
MD-PhD students.
MaryAnn O’Neill, program director
for the Center for Entrepreneurial
Studies, was intrigued by the syllabus.
“This will give students from all fields
a serious look into science manage-ment,”
she says. “It calls for a differ-ent
kind of thinking, and it will help
our Launching the Venture students
be more prepared if their enterprises
need research funding or if they head
toward patent applications.”
Quigg is pleased with the cross-de-partment
connection. “I’m delighted
that we’ll have business students add-ing
to our class discussions. The more
viewpoints, the better.”
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Throughout News & Notes, we list
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M.S., and Ph.D. Computer Science
and Math Sciences alumni.
News Notes
Professor Anselmo Lastra attended the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 conference in Singapore and
met up with a few alums and old friends there. Pictured from left to right: Jason Yang, Justin
Hensley (Ph.D. 2007), Mark Harris (Ph.D. 2003), Professor Anselmo Lastra, and Sung-Eui Yoon
(Ph.D. 2005).